I just received my copy of BroadcastEngineering magazine for March. There was an interesting article in there about Channel 7 and what they are up to. Anyone who watches the Seven News or Sunrise program will notice that it is now in a studio in the centre of Sydney. But that is not where the control room is.

Their control room is in Melbourne. Yes. Melbourne. And the journalists are in Pyrmont. Channel 7 have re-engineered their business for Digital TV and moved a lot of their production to Melbourne for all their main stations. This has resulted in significant savings for them. They have a server in Sydney to output program content in case of network issues.

This allows them to save on bandwidth. A digital TV signal is up to 20 MBits/Second which is a lot. The ethernet on most PC’s is only 100 MBit/sec, and most people only have 0.25 MBit on their ADSL. During the Olympics, we had 230 MBit/Second per video feed coming out of auburn hospital. There were 23 feeds in and out of our site, equating to a feed of about 5 GBits/Second. This is a LOT of data. The racks from Auburn Hospital are in the photos below. And why Auburn Hospital? It was our switching centre for any of the external races… Such as the marathon.